I always used to edit my mobile photos with Snapseed or by sending them over to my laptop to edit in Adobe Lightroom on desktop, but with the improvements in Lightroom Mobile over the past couple of years I’ve deleted Snapseed and do everything in Lightroom Mobile. The advances made in mobile photography combined with the power of this software means we have an incredible amount of power in our pockets. One tool within Lightroom Mobile that I thought could do with a little more punch is the Healing Tool. I was pleasantly surprised to see a recent update has improved it.

The photo I’m going to use to show the tool is of a Sigma 150-600mm f/5-6.3 DG DN that Sigma UK have kindly given me for my upcoming arctic mission. I shot it on a custom flat-lay background that I made. The flat-lay I used wasn’t long enough for this topdown photo so I shot it diagonally, using my iPhone camera and Profoto A2 with Clic Softbox Octa. I shot in Apple ProRAW and took the photo over to Adobe Lightroom Mobile to make the adjustments.

Filling in the corners using simple edits with the Healing Brush Tool gave me this result:

Getting to this end result was simple. Adobe have modified the Tool to give us three options when we’re using the Healing Tool: Remove, Heal, and Clone. We’ve moved on from simple spot removal to the ability to quickly and easily make some quite complex adjustments, simply by painting over an area with our finger.

I used to Remove Healing Brush Tool to paint over the areas outside of the blue flat-lay, with a very slight overlap so the software would know where I wanted it to pick up the pixels to fill in with. I only had to make a couple of adjustments to achieve a great result.

I’m very happy with this update to Adobe Lightroom Mobile. The power of mobile photography is being matched with the capabilities of mobile and cloud-based editing. Adobe, you’ve given us the perfect update for retouching on the move.

Much love
Dave